4 Ways to Cut Down Your Carbon Footprint while Flying

Catching flights every now and then has become a routine for thousands of people from business and corporate backgrounds. In today’s world, where the need for smarter and greener technologies is continuously increasing, it is important that we, as travelers, take certain steps for making our flights greener.

We have mentioned 4 tips that can help people make their flights more efficient in terms of energy usage. Everything, right from choosing an aircraft, to seating arrangements of your flight and also the timing of the flight, everything has an implication on the efficiency of a flight.

Some of the important factors to be considered are the load factor of passenger, freight share, fuel economy and distance. These are all important factors for measuring flight carbon footprints. One of the good news is that efficiency of air travel has gone up by 20% since thirteen to fourteen years ago in 2000, which in turn saves United States $33 billion on fuel and it also prevents around 670 billion pounds of CO2 from being emitted.

Choose a Bigger Plane: Bigger planes consume lesser fuel due to the greater capacity. Depending upon the fuel consumed by a plane per capacity pound-mile we can easily find that bigger planes are more fuel efficient compared to smaller ones. United Airlines and Cathay Pacific offer the passengers the most fuel efficient planes and the smaller ones from ExpressJet and American Eagle are less efficient. Today 15% more passengers flow on fuel efficient planes compared to 2000.

Go for a Non-Stop Flight: Distance traveled is one of the biggest determinants of footprint of a passenger. You can buy cheap business class tickets and go on your flight for less but if you are in a flight that has multiple stops then you know for the fact that you are covering more distance. You should known that a plane’s ascent and take off take more fuel compared to what is consumed at the flying altitudes. This naturally makes the short haul flights less efficient compared to the ones that go long non-stop.

A Fuller Flight: It is almost a no brainer here. Any flight that carries more number of passengers will naturally be more fuel efficient and will have lesser carbon footprint per passengers. Mostly people travel in the flights that are around 80% full and on the other hand an average plane is around 74% full. The time of the year during which the passengers fly also contributes towards the efficiency factor. Summertime is the best to travel with more people for a vacation.

Check if the airline transports both cargo and people: 78% of all commercial flights carry extra cargo beyond luggage and passengers. Even then during the last decade the average freight that was carried went down by nearly half. This directly relates to increased load factor of the passenger. This means the flights were filled with more passengers and the space for cargo was less or there was no space left for cargo.